N.J. scientists gather to watch announcement of major physics discovery

British physicist Peter Higgs, right, speaks with Belgium physicist Francois Englert at a press conference on July 4, 2012 at European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) offices in Meyrin near Geneva.

PRINCETON — For the New Jersey scientists involved in what could be one of the biggest scientific discoveries in history, the party started at 3 a.m. Wednesday with bottles of champagne and Higgs boson sugar cookies.

Dozens of local physicists, researchers, theorists and students quietly gathered for an early morning soiree in Princeton. The group watched a live feed from Switzerland where scientists announced they believe they have detected the Higgs boson, one of the building blocks of the universe.

Most in the room, including teams of Rutgers and Princeton physicists who had worked on the project, knew for weeks the announcement was coming. But they wanted to gather to be part of history.

"This is something that we’ve been waiting for — the field has been waiting for — for at least 20 years," said Amit Lath, a Rutgers associate professor of physics who contributed to the project. "You knew you had to be there."

The group gathered at the Institute for Advanced Study, the independent research center located in Princeton that had once been the academic home of Albert Einstein. Though it was early in the morning, those who attended the Higgs boson party said they were wide awake as they watched the lengthy scientific explanation from the CERN particle-physics center near Geneva that concluded with the announcement of the landmark discovery.

"It was basically dead silence for two hours until the applause started," said Scott Thomas, a Rutgers physics professor who contributed to the discovery. "It was too exciting to sleep."

Along with champagne, the New Jersey group noshed on homemade iced sugar cookies decorated with a Greek letter meant to represent the Higgs boson particle.

Fabrice Coffrini/AFP/GettyImagesA picture with a zoom effect show a graphic traces of proton-proton collisions events measured by European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experience on May 25, 2011 in the search for the Higgs boson.

The Rutgers and Princeton scientists were among several thousand physicists who contributed to the Higgs discovery by analyzing trillions of proton-proton collisions performed at the Large Hadron Collider on the border of Switzerland and France. The researchers were divided into two teams, called Atlas and CMS.

The Rutgers and Princeton physicists were both part of the CMS team. Rutgers officials said their group, which includes a half dozen professors assisted by numerous students and researchers over the years, has been contributing to the project since 1995.

Rutgers helped lead the effort to build the silicon pixel detector at the heart of the Higgs boson discovery, campus officials said. Rutgers professors also helped analyze the data and lead groups of scientists exploring the theories behind the discovery.

At Princeton University, about 15 researchers contributed to the project, campus officials said. The university’s physicists were responsible for determining luminosity, one of the key measures that helped researchers calculate how many elusive particles they should expect to see in their experiments.

The search for the Higgs boson is far from over, according to those working on the project. They plan to continue their research to confirm they have really found the Higgs boson or if the discovery will lead to new fields of research.

"The Higgs mechanism is really a window into a whole set of physics that we have yet to explore," Daniel Marlow, a Princeton physics professor who worked on the project, said in a statement.